Returning Home: Diné Poetry, Essays, Art & Journalism from Utah's Intermountain Indian School (1950-1983, Brigham City, UT) (S3 E14)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. We hope if there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast or if this is your first time listening, we hope you'll go back and listen to dozens of other prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere. Finally, if you have an idea or know someone who should be interviewed on Speak Your Piece, please write us at askahistorian at utah.gov. My guests today are three authors of Returning Home, Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain School. The school we are talking about is the Intermountain Indian School, closed in 1984, located in Brigham City, Utah.
This book has been published by the University of Arizona Press this fall, 2021
My guests are Dr. Farina King, Associate Professor of History and an affiliate of the Department of Cherokee and Indigenous Studies at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma.
Dr. Michael Taylor, Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the American Indian Studies Program at Brigham Young University in Provo. Finally, Dr. James Swenson, Associate Professor of Art History and the History of Photography, also from BYU Provo. Welcome and good morning, Farina, Michael, and James.

**James Swenson** (1:55)
Glad to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:57)
All three of my guests today are remarkable young scholars that we want you to know more about. To read their bios and learn more about each of their respective publications and scholarship, look up on our show notes online at community.utah.gov backslash Speak Your Piece.
With that, we have a wonderful, I think, a wonderful program ahead and thank you all. Would one of you start out our time together by reading a small essay or poem produced by the Intermountain Indian School students that has lingered in your mind?

**Farina King** (2:37)
I mean, I don't know which one Mike and James were thinking because there's so many incredible words.

**James Swenson** (2:48)
Even if you guess it, like we probably have others, so we're probably good.

**Farina King** (2:51)
I know, but I mean, I thought about this on a number of occasions, and I'm sure Mike and James can add more, and definitely Mike because he wrote a whole article about Henry Tinhorn, and he's been heavily emphasized in our piece, and the incredible journey and connections that have been made. But I just love, and this is why I included it in the introduction on page six, was Mountain's Lament by Henry Tinhorn, and I thought it was so interesting in our work how we each kind of read something out of it, too, because for me, when I read it, and do you want me to read it?

**Brad Westwood** (3:37)
Yes, yes. I want to start the interview with a piece of writing.

**Farina King** (3:44)
So this is from this, what we quote in the introduction as well, is Henry Tinhorn's, one of his poems, Mountain's Lament, where he says, Where are my people? The mountains cry out. I've seen them play and live in my hands, and I felt them run the trail of my back. Before the sleepy winter came, I heard their laughter ring out and fill the valleys with joy. Now, there's only the sounds of silence where once a baby had talked in meaningless sentences. Mr. Sun, you've traveled. Do you know where my people are? A drop of golden sunshine was the answer. Have you seen my people? The mountains asked the sky, but the rains came and that was the sky's reply. That's that quote, and I think it really sticks out to me because in a lot of my work, I've thought about how Diné intellectual process sees and so much that is central to Diné identity is the teachings of Sanhagai Bik'eh H'jón which has been roughly translated as walk in beauty, but those teachings have been embodied in the landscape and specifically the four sacred mountains, the symbolism of Zithdien, sacred mountains.
And so that poem caught my attention because it encapsulated so much that we're focusing on in this book is home and the mountains, they are intertwined of what homelands mean to Diné on even a spiritual level on so many levels.
And Tin Horn is writing this poem while he's at Intermountain and so much that he's saying there is connecting to that. So I don't know, Mike, James, I'm sure you have things to say too.